Hockey Players' Career Lengths

Watching the 2001-02 Stanley Cup finals, I found myself somewhat
surprised at how long some of the participants have played for. Ron Francis
has been in the NHL since 1981-82 (in his rookie season, he was a
teammate of Dave Keon), Chris Chelios and Steve Yzerman have been
playing since 1983-84, and several others have been NHL regulars
since the mid-1980's. Also, several other
players (such as Igor Larionov) had logged
several years in Europe's elite leagues before joining the NHL.

This seems rather unusual to someone like me, who first learned
about hockey in the 1980's. While it is nice, in a way, to see these
players continue playing, it strikes me that, not all that long ago,
people's careers weren't that long. In the 1980's, after
Keon retired, I don't recall a lot of ancient players in the NHL.
People like Gilbert Perrault, Guy Lafleur and Larry Robinson were
very much an exception. Nowadays, Detroit has several ancients,
and there are others scattered throughout the league. This raises
two questions: First, is my perception correct, or am I just
imagining that things were different in the 1980's than they are now,
and second, why?

In an attempt to answer these questions, I'm going to look at one
aspect of the big picture.
Specifically, I'm going to look at every year
during which major-league professional hockey was played
(In this exercise, I use a definition of "major league"
similar to that used by Klein and Reif in
The Klein and Reif Hockey Compendium; i.e.
it includes the NHL, WHA, NHA (1909-10 to 1916-17), ECHA (1908-09),
PCHA (1911-12 to 1923-24), and WCHL/WHL (1921-22 to 1925-26).).
Out of all players who made their major league debut in
any given year, I'll find the last year during which at least one of those
players was still playing major league hockey.
In other words, the one aspect I'm looking at is the longest
careers of each era. Before I reveal the results, keep the
following points in mind:

I've only looked at the number of years played by skaters, and
ignored goaltenders. This doesn't affect the results significantly,
and there are some complications with applying this exercise to
goalies (Moe Roberts being a good example of this).

Interestingly enough, the total number of seasons is often
not (starting year - ending year + 1), for various reasons.
Some players spent one or more full seasons playing in leagues that this
survey doesn't consider to be major leagues (for
example, Joe Malone played in the CHA and OPHL in 1909-10).
Lester Patrick was a coach for most of the 1920's and
only filled in when required, leading to gaps of a few years in his career.
Other players fought in World War I or II, interrupting their
careers. Some players made comebacks after they had retired for a
few years. And so on, and so on.

Obviously, any complete statistical analysis to determine exactly
exactly how long people played during all of the different eras of the
game would have to look at other things as well (for example:
total number of seasons played, total number of full seasons played,
average number of [full] seasons played, average ages of players, etc.).
However, this exercise isn't an overly complicated one to perform,
and it's interesting and somewhat revealing anyway.

So, here goes:

Year

Last season of any skater who debuted that year

Player (seasons)

1908-09

1923-24

Joe Malone (15)

1909-10

1927-28

Lester Patrick (15)

1910-11

1927-28

Odie Cleghorn (17), Sprague Cleghorn (17)

1911-12

1926-27

Ken Randall (14)

1912-13

1929-30

Frank Nighbor (18)

1913-14

1925-26

Leth Graham (8)

1914-15

1929-30

Mickey MacKay (15)

1915-16

1931-32

Buck Boucher (17)

1916-17

1932-33

Reg Noble (17)

Apart from Leth Graham (who played a grand total of
27 NHL games over six seasons, if you can call them that) sneaking in,
there are few surprises here. Ignoring Graham's "numbers", the
mean and median number of years played of the eight other people is 16.
Keep this figure in mind for future reference.

Also, keep in mind that, since I've defined major
professional hockey to start with the ECHA of 1908-09, by definition
no-one started their major league career before then. This does penalise
people like Newsy Lalonde and Lester Patrick, whose careers
started before this date.

Also, the last player to hang up their skates isn't always
the player who played the most number of seasons. For example,
Newsy Lalonde played 18 seasons between 1909-10 and 1926-27 but doesn't
appear here because Lester Patrick played in a single playoff game in 1927-28.
Similarly, Billy Bell played 10 seasons between 1913-14 and 1923-24.

1917-18

1926-27

Jack Adams (10)

1918-19

1925-26

Wilf Loughlin (8)

1919-20

1930-31

Babe Dye (11)

1920-21

1930-31

Frank Frederickson (11)

Looking at the above numbers, keep in mind that few
people started their careers around this time, and the debuts of those
who did may have been postponed due to World War I.

1921-22

1943-44

Frank Boucher (18)

1922-23

1937-38

Aurel Joliat (16)

1923-24

1936-37

Frank Finnigan (14), Sylvio Mantha (14), Howie Morenz (14)

1924-25

1940-41

Hooley Smith (17)

1925-26

1939-40

Hec Kilrea (15), Nels Stewart (15)

Ah, now these numbers are rather similar to those from
between 1908-09 and 1916-17. It seems
that careers in the 14-to-18-year range are the maximum that a hockey
player can expect, at least in this era.

1926-27

1938-39

Paul Thompson (13)

1927-28

1946-47

Dit Clapper (20)

The first player to play major league hockey for 20 seasons. Also,
the first to play for 19.

1928-29

1944-45

Mush March (17)

1929-30

1945-46

Syd Howe (17)

1930-31

1940-41

Johnny Sorrell (11), Paul Haynes (11)

1931-32

1945-46

Earl Seibert (15), Ott Heller (15)

1932-33

1944-45

Bill Thoms (13)

1933-34

1945-46

Herb Cain (13), Lorne Carr (13)

In five out of the preceding six seasons, the last
player to still be playing finishes out their career in 1944-45 or
1945-46. I'll discuss some possible reasons for this clumping below.

1934-35

1947-48

Toe Blake (14), Nick Metz (12)

1935-36

1953-54

Woody Dumart (16)

1936-37

1954-55

Milt Schmidt (16)

1937-38

1950-51

Bob Hamill (12)

1938-39

1953-54

Sid Abel (14)

1939-40

1953-54

Doug Bentley (13)

1940-41

1953-54

Elmer Lach (14), Max Bentley (12)

1941-42

1958-59

Kenny Mosdell (16)

1942-43

1959-60

Rocket Richard (18)

1943-44

1955-56

Don Raleigh (10)

1944-45

1964-65

Ted Lindsay (17)

1945-46

1957-58

Jim Thomson (13), Tony Leswick (12)

Nothing too unexpected here. While the difference between the
starting year and ending year is quite similar to that of previous
years, the total number of years played is smaller in several cases,
as the careers of many of these players were interrupted by World War II.

1946-47

1979-80

Gordie Howe (32)

1947-48

1968-69

Doug Harvey (20)

1948-49

1968-69

Allan Stanley (21)

1949-50

1973-74

Tim Horton (24)

1950-51

1973-74

Alex Delvecchio (24)

1951-52

1973-74

Eric Nesterenko (22)

1952-53

1975-76

Harry Howell (24)

1953-54

1974-75

Doug Mohns (22)

1954-55

1975-76

Larry Hillman (22)

1955-56

1977-78

Johnny Bucyk (23)

1956-57

1977-78

Frank Mahovlich (22)

1957-58

1979-80

Bobby Hull (23), Carl Brewer (13)

1958-59

1979-80

Stan Mikita (22)

1959-60

1978-79

J.C. Tremblay (20)

1960-61

1981-82

Dave Keon (22)

Now these numbers are quite different.
In each of the above fifteen years, there is at least one person
whose career started that year who played for at least twenty years
(twenty-five skaters in total, some of whom aren't listed above).
Previously, only Dit Clapper had played for twenty years,
no-one else had reached 19, and only a small number of players played
for 18 years. So, this is quite a departure from everything previous.

1961-62

1978-79

Ed Westfall (18), Pit Martin (17)

1962-63

1980-81

Terry Harper (19)

1963-64

1980-81

Phil Esposito (18), Ron Ellis (16)

1964-65

1982-83

Wayne Cashman (17)

1965-66

1981-82

Don Marcotte (15)

1966-67

1982-83

Carol Vadnais (17), Serge Savard (17)

Yep, those 15's and 16's and 17's and 18's look more familiar.
Interestingly enough, even though someone who started their career in
1946-47 was still playing in 1979-80, namely - all together now,
everybody - Gordie Howe, everyone who started their careers
in the inappropriately-named "original six" era (1966-67 and before)
had retired by the end of 1982-83. Actually, it's sort of unfair to classify
Cashman, Marcotte, Savard and Vadnais as representatives of that era, as they
played a total of 15 regular-season games before expansion (with Vadnais
picking up 11 of that total). The last player remaining who played a full
"original six" season was Dave Keon, who retired at the end of 1981-82.

1967-68

1982-83

Walt McKechnie (16), Garry Unger (16)

1968-69

1984-85

Brad Park (17)

1969-70

1984-85

Butch Goring (16)

1970-71

1986-87

Gilbert Perrault (17)

1971-72

1990-91

Guy Lafleur (17)

1972-73

1991-92

Larry Robinson (20)

1973-74

1994-95

Mark Howe (22)

Hmmm, we've got a few people now who are playing for twenty years
or more again... The numbers between 1967-68 and 1971-72 aren't too
surprising, though.

1974-75

1990-91

Harold Snepsts (17)

1975-76

1993-94

Gordie Roberts (19), Brian Trottier (18)

1976-77

1992-93

Randy Carlyle (17)

1977-78

1994-95

Kent Nilsson (11)

For now, the survey ends here, as there's
still an active player who started their career in 1978-79, namely
Mark Messier, who as of 2003-04 has played in 26 major league seasons,
giving him the second-longest major league career of all time. This
era of hockey seems to be seeing a renaissance of the
20-year veteran. In the five years between 1997-98 and 2001-02 (when I
originally wrote this article, in case you're wondering about the
seemingly arbitrary date), 12 skaters (as well as one
goaltender, John Vanbiesbrouck) logged 20 major league seasons. In
alphabetical order, they are: Dave Andreychuk, Ray Bourque, Paul Coffey,
Ron Francis, Mike Gartner, Wayne Gretzky, Phil Housley, Al MacInnis,
Mark Messier, Larry Murphy, Scott Stevens, and Pat Verbeek. Since then,
they have been joined by internationally acclaimed superstar
Marc Bergevin, as well
as Chris Chelios, Ken Daneyko, Doug Gilmour, James Patrick, Steve Thomas,
and Steve Yzerman, with, no doubt, more
to come to a hockey "centre" near you (not a lot of "arenas" around now, it
seems) really soon. It certainly seems
that I wasn't hallucinating, and that there really are more ancient players
in the league now than there were 20 years ago.

Okay, so seeing all of those familiar names was refreshing, and
I've answered the first question I posed above, but what about the
other question? In other words, what does all this data mean?
While it's probably not a good idea to
extrapolate about all players who debuted in a given year based on
the length of one player's career, the numbers above give
a rough idea, at least, about the lengths of careers throughout the
ages. Combine this rough idea with an analysis of the conditions of
the day, and we can probably start to be able to draw some conclusions.
Let's graph those years in the middle column
(which represent, as I hope you remember, the last year in which a
player who debuted in that year still played). This is represented
by the red lines at the bottom. The green lines represent the number
of major league teams, which is also somewhat interesting:

The interesting bits are the graph's clumps and gaps. The first
clump occurs around 1926-27, after the Western Hockey League disbanded.
With three fewer major league teams, the competition for jobs would be
higher, so ancient players who would previously had a spot on a roster
might find themselves out of a job. There's another clump around the
start of the 1930's, when franchises started dropping out of the NHL.

The next clump is found around 1944-45. Even though the number of
teams was static around that time, the talent pool had shrunk
drastically, with most of the talented players in an army.
So, we could assume that a lot of players' careers
were lengthened by the lack of talent in the league at the time
(at least those players who were still around), but
by the end of the war these people started to retire.

There's a bit of a peak around 1953-54, but that seems just a
coincidence. Moving right along, there's an incredibly large clump
in the ten years between 1973-74 and 1982-83. Between 1975-76 and
1979-80, there's a steady decline in (mostly WHA) teams, which might
explain why the ancient players started retiring, but how did their
careers get so long in the first place?

Certainly the huge increase in major league teams (from 6
in 1966-67 to 32 in 1974-75) caused the demand for hockey
players to greatly outpace the supply, and so inflated the careers of
several of the people on the list above. However, this isn't a
complete explanation. By the end of 1966-67, before expansion, some
players (Gordie Howe, Bill Gadsby, Red Kelly)
who had already logged 20 seasons, and there were others who were close.

Looking at the list of players above, none of them played their
final season between 1960-61 and 1963-64, only Ted Lindsay played
his final season in 1964-65 (although that was a bit of an exception,
as Lindsay hadn't played the previous four years), and no-one else
between 1965-66 and 1967-68. Any sort of balance between age and youth
that existed prior to the 1960's was lost.
Veterans with 10, 15, even 20 years under their belts became
the norm, and the number of rookies declined drastically.

Just to show you that this really was the case, and I'm not just
making this up to justify the numbers in the previous graph, here's
another graph. This time the red lines represent the number of people
who made their NHL debut in each year (note that, for example, 47
represents 1946-47 here). The green lines represent how many of those
players played a full season:

Of course, the green bar isn't exactly equal to
the number of rookies in each season, as it doesn't include people
who only played a small number of games in a previous season.

There's a significant difference between the left-hand side of
the graph (1946-47 to 1956-57) and the right-hand
side of the graph (1957-58 to 1966-67). The average number
of players who played a full season in their first NHL season in the
first 11 years is about 7.8, whereas for the last 10 years it's only
4.4. Why is this? Not because there were no talented younger players
(as can be shown by the number of talented "rookies" in 1967-68 who
were in their late 20's or even in their 30's). This graph is
rather hard to explain by taking an objective look at the numbers,
but a subjective look might help.

Probably the best explanation is that, by the late 1950's, team
owners figured out that, in order to attract fans to their arenas,
it was a much better idea to have a lineup full of veterans than
one full of rookies.
Who'd want to pay money to see a bunch of people they didn't know?
The reason why people knew who all of the players were wasn't
because they didn't wear helmets, it's because they were the same
players that they'd seen for the past 5, 10, even 15 or more years.

What about after 1966-67? In one word, expansion. Expansion
increased the demand for jobs, and prolonged the careers of many
of the people listed above. In 1972-73 the WHA came along, and
with 28 major league teams, many veterans who might otherwise have been
forced to retire managed to retain a job somewhere. With the
demand for anyone who could lace a pair of skates far exceeding
the supply, many were able to prolong their careers to hitherto
unimaginable lengths.

After the demise of the WHA after the 1978-79 season, major
league hockey settled down to a more manageable 21 teams, and
after a while the longest career lengths too shrank down to what they had been
before.

That was a refreshing history lesson. Let's apply this to what's
going on today. In the 1990's, the NHL expanded five times, bringing
the total number of teams in the league to 30. Once again, the
demand for hockey players now far exceeds the supply, and there is
still demand for a 20-year veteran.

To summarize: When you see people who have been in the NHL who
have been there for 20 years, it means one of two things. Either
the pool of available talent is no longer able to support the number
of teams around, or that the owners now value veterans highly in
order to draw spectators in. The career of Dit Clapper, who as I
mentioned above was the first player to play 20 seasons of major-league
hockey, was prolonged by World War II, when young hockey players
who would otherwise have taken his place were in the armed forces.
The careers of a lot of people who debuted in the late 1940's and
1950's were prolonged by two factors: First the owners started to
place a premium on age, and expansion and the WHA combined to
exhaust the talent pool and keep grizzled veterans employed.
Nowadays, the NHL has more teams than the NHL and WHA combined did
during most of the 1970's (1974-75 and 1975-76 being the exceptions),
and once again the demand for hockey players surpasses
the supply, so we once again are seeing the return of players who
have played for 20 or more seasons.

I'll close this off with a diversion: What player has played
against the most major league hockey teams? Well, since there were
a total of 34 different franchises between the WHA and the NHL in
total in the mid-1970's, there are probably a fair number of people
who have played against about 34 franchises. Could anyone have
played against more? The only way they could do that is if they
played in the modern-day expansion era (or if they played in the
1930's, but that's obviously not a reasonable possibility).

Looking at the table above, a reasonable candidate who played in both the
WHA and NHL is Mark Howe. Looking at this career, he would have been able to
play against all 16 different WHA franchises, the 17 NHL franchises that
weren't previously part of the WHA, and 5 of the franchises the joined
the NHL ranks in the 1990's (while I'm not 100% sure that Howe played
against Florida, he did play 44 games in 1993-94 so it's probably not
a bad bet that one of them was against Florida). That's 38 franchises
in total. I can't think of anyone else who would have played against
more. Neat, eh?

Actually, I'm going to close this article off with yet another
diversion. I got a question a little while ago about how long the
average career length is for a defenceman. This is a somewhat
tricky question, which is why I avoided it completely in the article above.
I thought I'd take a look at it here though. I decided to look at the 1999-00
season, which is recent enough that the results I get have a hope of being
relevant today, but long enough ago that it's likely (but certainly not certain)
that people who haven't played in the NHL since then won't be playing in the
NHL in the future either. Anyway, in 1999-00 there were 32 defencemen who
played in the NHL that year but haven't played in the NHL since. These 32
defencemen spent the following number of seasons in the NHL:

Number of seasons

Number of players

1

8

2

6

4

1

5

3

6

1

7

1

8

3

10

2

12

2

13

1

16

3

17

1

These data have a mean of 6.1875 seasons, a median of 5 seasons, and a
mode of 1 season (which is sort of revealing). So, it probably makes sense
to say that the average NHL career length of a defenceman is about 5 to 6
years. One final thing I should say about this diversion is that I've
counted seasons, not full seasons. So, for example, if someone
played one game in the NHL, I've counted that as a full season. If I had
only counted "full" seasons (whatever that means), quite a lot of people
would have ended up playing zero seasons.